The Pirate Bay and EZTV raided and shut down, but will they stay dead?

As long as piracy sites, scenes, and groups have existed, they get raided, shut down, and contributors feel the inescapable wrath of the law. Most piracy sites, even private community darlings like Demonoid, come to an end. The world’s most popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay, has been able to avoid its own demise for quite a while, but has now been raided by Swedish police and shut down — and TPB wasn’t the only popular casualty.

Torrent sites randomly go down for various reasons — attacks, legal issues, switching servers, or simple maintenance — but due to the nature of the service they provide, fans quickly become nervous when that service vanishes from the internet. The Pirate Bay — a (somehow) generally stable site — recently vanished from the internet, and it has been confirmed that it was the result of raid by law enforcement. Other popular torrent sites, like EZTV, were also hit by the raid.

The Swedish police seized TPB’s computers, servers, and other equipment. It has also been confirmed that the raid took an entire morning, and consisted of a sizable amount officers and digital forensics experts. It’s unclear if any arrests were made, but TorrentFreak suggests at least one man may have been.

Like Demonoid, most high profile piracy sites rise from the ashes after time, and The Pirate Bay and EZTV should be no different. It may take a while — it took Demonoid two years — but the brand of TPB (and to a lesser extent, EZTV) is big enough to make a comeback at some point. The Pirate Bay has been raided or forced to drop service before — the most major instance having taken place back in 2006 — and up until today, it was going strong.

In a statement, co-founder and former spokesperson for the TPB Peter Sunde hopes that the site stays down. He says that it has long since lost its soul and original vision, pointing toward the ever-growing number of ads placed on the site in favor of fixing bugs and cleaning up the code. Sunde also isn’t the only co-founder of the site that thinks it should stay dead.

For now, The Pirate Bay and EZTV are down, and we’ll see how long that holds. The raid took down some heavy hitters, but it won’t be long before those sites’ communities flock to other sites that can fill the now-gaping torrent hole.